Beck’s Lowest Blow?

In tarnishing Soros’s Shoah experience, Beck tarnishes the Shoah

Glenn Beck’s spectacularly paranoid “documentary” that characterizes George Soros as an omniscient, Sauron-esque immortal who jet-sets around the world toppling governments and destabilizing currencies for profit has made its way beyond the ravening hordes of the Angry Elderly and into the mainstream media, where some very smart people are parsing whether Beck’s characterization of an elderly Jew with a foreign accent as an all-powerful warmonger with rapacious tentacles squeezing the life out of the helpless globe is anti-Semitic on purpose (after all, Beck has been such a friend to Israel). Somewhere, Joseph Goebbels is instructing his attorneys to prepare an intellectual property lawsuit.

I’m willing to believe that Beck is too stupid to fully understand the accusations he has leveled at Soros. But there is a far more disturbing (and less examined) claim embedded in Beck’s film, which has much farther-reaching and damaging repercussions for Jews than the easily refutable international conspiracy mumbo-jumbo seconded by the intelligence ministry of Iran. It is Beck’s characterization of Soros, a Holocaust survivor, as a Nazi collaborator who actively aided in sending Jews to the death camps. As a 13-year-old.

Because that is what Soros was in March 1944, when the Germans invaded his native Budapest: Thirteen. A child marked for death by a superpower, young Soros, along with scores of other Jewish children, was instructed to deliver deportation notices to other Jews. As Soros himself has explained, in a narrative most people find moving, not damning: “I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper … and this list of names. I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. … He said, ‘You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported.’”

After his father made the agonizing decision to split up his family in the hopes of a better chance of its partial survival, Soros was given forged documents and sent to live in hiding with a Hungarian official charged with confiscating property from the country homes of deported Jews. This man occasionally brought the young Soros along, rather than leave him alone in a war-torn city that the retreated Germans were beginning to blow up. This official, who confiscated Jewish property yet also, at incredible personal risk, saved the life of a Jewish boy, is a human contradiction that Beck’s idiot Manicheanism is ill-equipped to handle.

The experience of the Holocaust was death. Jews that lived lived at someone else’s fatal expense. You had a hiding place because someone else didn’t. You received an extra potato because someone else starved. Such was the unique cruelty of the Shoah. But Beck’s condemnation of a barely teenage boy’s route to survival (whatever you think of the grown man’s politics) amounts to an indictment of every Jew who managed to survive. So Glenn Beck is judging every Jewish child who hid with a Polish family and was taught to spout anti-Semitic canards; every Jewish man that mistakenly thought working as a Sonderkommando might buy him his life; every Jewish mother that smothered her screaming infant so that the other six people hiding under the floorboards might not be discovered. He is echoing the most pernicious claims of the more genteel Holocaust deniers that the Shoah was the outcome of some internecine conflict between two evenly matched peoples with similarly legitimate grievances.

I don’t know Glenn Beck’s life. I may have read Mein Kampf three times, but I haven’t yet been able to make myself crack open The Christmas Sweater. Maybe he’s had a hard time; he certainly seems to feel more sorry for himself than any Holocaust survivor I’ve ever known. But if his public displays of hysteria regarding Nazis and who is or isn’t one are anything to go by, it seems like, to Glenn Beck, the most legitimate victim of the Holocaust is Glenn Beck.

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Like you I find the comment by Glenn Beck about Soros during the Nazi era offensive and fraudulent. Glenn Beck has been conducting Sherman’s march through the terrain of truth for quite a while.

Let me be the devil’s advocate. Why should Jews have more right to protest than any other group he has grotesquely slandered?

Glenn Beck is a foul abomination along with some of the other prominent figures of the right. (The left in the US has such abominations as well, but none with substantial influence). And yes, quite a few of them have been tinkering with racism, jingoism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and an ugly sort of liberal bashing.

As the old saw goes: when they came for the xxx, I said nothing… etc. Why does the outrage only come full force now that it is directed at us?

P.S.- I write this as the son of holocaust survivors. My father (with his father’s blessing) left the family as a teen and hid out using false Christian papers. Ironically, like Soros, my father was from Budapest.

PPS- Amazingly, in the ultra orthodox community Beck has still not lost that muchy of his substantial following.

Jonsays:

November 15, 2010 - 2:53 pm

Soros [of the Nazi occupation] “were the happiest times of my life. We led an adventurous life and we had fun together.”
Your support for Soros, a self proclaimed atheist who funds anti-Israel groups and is for a Marxist Global power grab, (his words) is a disgrace. Not everyone was a victim some joined in. The ‘just trying to survive’ excuse is what the Nazi’s said Nuremberg! Jews like me will no longer let leftist Jews like you play that card.

Herbert Kainesays:

November 15, 2010 - 2:57 pm

As the child of Holocaust survivors, I would be very much interested in knowing whether Becks accusations are true. If they are true, Mr Beck should be praised

Michaelsays:

November 15, 2010 - 3:08 pm

Here’s a well written piece fully supporting Beck’s viewpoint. Soros is a menace to Jews and a danger to the world.

Rachel, great work, as usual. These comments from the anti-Soros crowd are really bizarre, so I figured you were deserving of some good old fashioned support. Keep it up.

Lisa Kaisersays:

November 15, 2010 - 5:49 pm

Glen Beck is an idiot. But he did not tarnish the Shoah. Nothing can tarnish the Shoah–certainly not a fool like glen Beck. Beck only tarnished himself and affirmed for the thinking public that he is a total moron.

Larrysays:

November 15, 2010 - 9:24 pm

Sooner or later people like Beck, Soros, etc., exemplify karma, hubris, etc. Or, in the alternative, just desserts.
Patience will set you free. You’ll have your schadenfreude.

Michaelsays:

November 16, 2010 - 12:31 pm

Another good piece for intelligent folks who would like to really understand the issues…

Soros undoubtedly does jet-set around the world toppling governments and destabilizing currencies for profit. One of your arguments seems to be that saying that is anti-Semitic, because Soros is an elderly Jew with a foreign accent. This does not seem to me to be a serious argument.

Johnny Americasays:

November 19, 2010 - 10:37 am

Americans need to wake up the fact that Glenn Beck is simply another opinion pushing charlatan who is a product of mormon cult theology that he mixes with parts of Catholicism and his personal core as a dry alcoholic. And for the record, he is a Mormon and not a Christian. The two are not the same and this makes Glenn Beck one very twisted screwed up moron who sold his soul to the lowest common denominator of personal stupidity. The religion of Islam has more in common with Christianity than the mormon cult.

The truth about Beck is that he a dry mormon alcoholic who never got the counseling required for alcoholics. Because he does not possess a single ounce of journalistic integrity, he is the perfect abortion poster child for Fox Network. Considering the fact that Beck’s personal views are extreme Marxist Libertarian, his form of patriotism is false and he is a person who has no real substance or depth.

Glenn Beck consistently demonstrates all the unstable behaviors of a dry alcoholic which include grandiosity, judgmentalism, intolerance, impulsivity, ADD, indecisiveness and blindness to truth. In short, Beck, Limbaugh, O Reilly, Hannity, Palin, O Donnell, Coulter and others like them frequently pervert truth, history, facts, religion and the US Constitution when they open their big mouths. Beck is simply part of a national league of pseudo-conservative idiots who make big money by selling lies and half truths to impressionable fools that occupy the lowest levels of society. Basically…tea baggers and registered republicans who are condemned to repeat the mistakes of history.

GHSsays:

November 21, 2010 - 11:53 am

I am shocked at those of you who are Jewish and agree with and find nothing wrong with what Beck is selling. Perhaps it is time for all Jews in America to have a class in Nazi history 101. Shocked at what I am reading in these posts. Beck has no idea about what he is speaking about and everyone Jewish or not, right or left should condemn him and perhaps boycott any companies who support him.

Dansays:

November 21, 2010 - 12:09 pm

Jews, like other minorities see anti – whatever, sometimes where it does not exist. If we examine the total of Beck statements it is hard to make the case that he is antisemitic. There are certain expressions like “blood sucking” that has a significance to Jews that the general public does not have. Here is the question:
What specific statements were made that you know to be false?
I know that “absence of proof is not proof of absence,” but lets look for statements that we can document to be false.

Thank you GHS for a moment of old-fashioned sanity! I, too shake my head in sad disbelief that anyone, including any of my fellow Jews could swallow Beck’s ignorant and unoriginal repackaging of early 20th century classical anti-semitism, Holocaust revisionism, Birch Society conspiracy rhetoric, and nativist faux populism. And thank you Rachel Shukert for a beautifully written, incisive essay.

brynababysays:

November 21, 2010 - 1:06 pm

And I say too, thankyou GHS and Corey! Thank God for a couple of sane voices in this sea of ignorance.

To be sure Beck is human and he did not experience survival as Jews did. It also might be interesting to make a living by filling the perceptive void of silence by words that a major faction may want to hear whether we believe them or not.

Arelsays:

November 21, 2010 - 5:22 pm

Well, if Mr. Soros really had such a hard time during the Shoah, why are there published accounts of him saying that he doesn’t feel any remorse for what he did do during those awful years. the man is a fraud and a danger. He could have helped Jews but he chose not to. Try looking a little deeper into the character of your heroes. He is a despicable human being and just because he is Jewish is no reason to adulate him. If he is, then when are you all going to some out singing for Bernie? Be honest.

Arelsays:

November 21, 2010 - 5:25 pm

Also, if you were paying attention, Abe foxman sent Mr. Beck a letter telling him that the report of Mr. Beck’s “anti-semitism” is untrue and was submitted by a “third party”. but when you think that J Street is a Jewish organization that supports/ Judaism, what else can you see?
the only thinking that will enable the Jewish people to survive is Torah. NOT George Soros or Obamamaman. Wake up.

LazerBeamsays:

November 21, 2010 - 11:09 pm

If, as Beck would have it, the key to the motivations and actions of George Soros is his willingness to sacrifice his own people, then and now, so that he might survive and profit at their and our expense, perhaps the key to Beck’s motivations and actions in demonizing George Soros is in his decision to convert to Mormonism.

Is Beck more dangerous if he actually believes his conspiracy theories, with George Soros starring as the anti-Christ in his mad machinations, or if he is only seeing how far he can push the anti-Semitic envelope during his conspiratorial rants for the entertainment of his ultra-conservative devotees, who are equally adept at anti-Semitic euphemisms? He’s not stupid or ignorant, so it is more likely that what he is doing is carefully crafted mass manipulation using love of country and intolerance of difference in the Nazi tradition. One can sell a lot of cornflakes, motivational speeches, and books in this way, but at what risk?

If Beck doesn’t really believe what he is saying, he is playing a most dangerous game, because he is increasingly inciting the paranoid faction of his ultra-conservative devotees to rhetorical Second Amendment remedies. If he loses control of them, and they increasingly resort to actual Second Amendment remedies, who will put the monster back in its cage?

To ensure that Rupert Murdoch’s Glenn Beck does not lose control of the paranoid mob he is inciting to violence, we must employ reverse mass psychology on Beck’s followers to neutralize him by exposing him as a slick, manipulative fraud whose real goal is to separate them from their money, not to restore America’s values or save it from an overreaching Federal Government. Perhaps we can get George Soros to pay for the conspiracy to defang Glenn Beck and his ilk. Convoluted irony, no? Or is Beck baiting Soros to act thusly to fulfill his paranoid prophecy, add grist to the mill, and pocket more profit?

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Tony Montaguesays:

January 30, 2012 - 3:00 pm

“Too stupid” is what I would have to be to accept the writer’s premise, that in correctly recognizing and exposing to the public, the obvious evil that is George Soros, Beck is somehow making an indictment of all Jews in making that exposure.

The fact that the personal greed of George Soros has caused enormous damage to the economies of other Nations is a matter of verifiable fact. The fact that George Soros has used his ill-gotten financial gains to aid our domestic enemies in the ongoing assualts on the United States of America that our forefathers shed blood to establish and preserve is also easily verified.

The idea put forward by the writer that in 1944, at age 13, Soros was not culpable in his actions is also a concept that requires one to be “too stupid” to accept without challenge. The early immigrants to this great nation were mature enough to start families, business ventures and fight in wars at that age.

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